May 15 2019 Meet #12: Our 1-Year Anniversary!

This meet marked the Seattle Commodore Computer Club’s twelfth meet – a solid year of meeting every month and sharing our retro-computing projects.

I can say from the bottom of my heart that it has been a total blast, and I look forward to many more years of good times in the future.

As of this writing, the club has grown to 18 members, 8 of which were able to attend this time around.

We had a jaw-dropping assortment of hardware and software on hand.

First up was Dan’s jaw-quiveringly gorgeous DOS-based Gridcase. This is the same amber-displayed “laptop” as seen in the movie Aliens.

Via a post on AtariAge:

 A GRiDCASE 1537, a variant of the GRiDCASE 15xx series that has a substantial amount of shielding designed explicitly to minimize radio frequency emissions that could be intercepted ostensibly by bad actors. It was a system that was not sold to the general public, and was only available through GRiD’s government services shell company, GSCS, and only if you had permission to acquire a unit from the appropriate superior.

The sound wasn’t particularly impressive, but everything else is just to die for.

Next we saw Christian’s very rare Commodore monitor 2024, hooked to one of his stock Amiga 1000s’. This monitor is also known as the Hedley Hi-Res monitor. This amazing montor did not use a special graphics card, yet could pump out insanely high-resolution flicker-free video (in black and white grayscale) using analog RGB. It’s hard to express how mind boggling this was to witness in-person.

He also had some fun with the stock A1000 and an original Amiga Genlock, hooked to a portable DVD player.

We even had the rare Amiga 1.4 Alpha Workbench on hand, as well as the first-ever game made for the Amiga (made in 1984 before the Amiga was on sale): Radar Raiders by SubLogic. Additional games included Arctic Fox and Archon, which was a total blast from the past.

Great night, good times, awesome people!